She arrived at the reserve before four in the morning, which was earlier than strictly necessary but which she preferred, the pre-dawn approach giving her time to settle into the hide and for the birds to forget, if they had noticed, the small disturbance of her passing. The car park was empty, the single sodium lamp above the entrance gate giving an orange light over the gravel and the gate post and the information board with its laminated notices about dogs on leads and the designation of the reserve and the rules. She had read the information board many times over the years and she did not read it now, just noted its presence, turned her torch on low, and went through the gate. The gate's latch clicked as it always did and the gate swung on its hinges with the resistance it always had and she went through and closed it behind her, and she was in the reserve.
The path from the gate to the reed bed was three hundred metres, a well-worn path of compacted gravel that she knew well enough to walk in near-darkness, the torch aimed at her feet and the path finding itself under the beam. On either side of the path the vegetation was invisible, black shapes against a slightly less black sky, the hedge on the left and the rank grass on the right, and the air smelled of the reserve, which had its own smell, the smell of still water and mud and the particular organic richness of a place where things grew and decomposed in the wet, a smell she associated with early mornings here and with the particular quality of attention that early mornings at this reserve produced.
She had walked this path in many weathers and at many hours over eleven years and she knew its surface precisely, the slight dip twenty metres from the gate where the ground was lower and water collected after rain, the point at which the hedge on the left gave way to the fence of the second field, the place where the gravel thinned and the earth showed through, the last bend before the hide came into view. She walked it now at her usual pace, the pace of a person going somewhere specific and familiar, not thinking about the walking but about what might be waiting at the end of it.